"They can hear me and be inspired"

Cheryl Hyman's journey from dropout to City Colleges chancellor
'THEY CAN HEAR ME AND BE INSPIRED' At 17, she ran from drug-addicted parents; at 40, she's running the City Colleges
March 3, 2010
BY Fran Spielman
City Hall Reporter
A former Orr High School dropout who left home to escape drug-addicted parents and rose to become a top executive at Commonwealth Edison is Mayor Daley's choice to become chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago.
Cheryl Hyman, 40, has told her compelling personal story to countless young people while serving as a mentor and prime mover at the Black Star Project.Now, she will oversee a $476 million a year City Colleges system with 5,700 employees and 115,000 students.
Hyman currently is ComEd's vice president of operations, strategy and business intelligence. She replaces Wayne Watson, who spent 10 years as chancellor before moving on to Chicago State University.
"What I bring to the kids more than anything else is hope and confidence. . . . I want them to know that you, too, can have these same problems and end up one day running one of the very institutions you graduated from," said Hyman, who attended Olive-Harvey College, got a bachelor's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology and earned master's degrees from North Park University and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
At 17, Hyman dropped out of Orr and left home to avoid following her parents down the dark tunnel of drug addiction. It was an excruciating decision made easier by the neighbors who took her in temporarily and the grandmother who provided a permanent home after a nomadic year of shuffling between homes.
"I had . . . a lot of anger. At the same time, those were my parents and I love them. But something in me knew that, if I stayed there, I would become a product of that, too. I didn't care how I was going to take care of myself. All I knew is that I could do better. . . . I was not going to allow my circumstances to dictate my destiny. And that's what I want these kids to understand," she said.
"I get asked all the time, 'What made you not do it?' I don't know. . . . But a lot of our kids don't have that inner strength. Success needs to look like them. Success needs to feel like them. They need to see me. They need to hear this. They need to see my parents," who have been clean for many years.
During his sometimes tumultuous tenure, Watson expanded athletics and started vocational training programs to help students enter careers in construction, health care and the culinary arts.
He also survived a bitter, three-week strike and faculty vote of no-confidence and oversaw the development of a new $254 million Kennedy-King College that created a "real campus," which Daley hopes to duplicate at all seven city colleges.
"That alone has changed the whole feeling of Englewood -- the whole South Side. . . . The excitement that both the staff has and the students -- it's just reinvigorated everyone," the mayor said in 2007.
Hyman shares the mayor's vision. "Thousands of young people who could be inspired by my story -- their success is hinging on my ability to do this job well. I do not take that lightly," she said.
"They can hear me and be inspired. But, I have to be able to build a world-class institution at a time of national recession that still puts them in a better position in life than when they came through the doors."

From The Black Star Project list